Changes in transit agency performance 2019 to 2024

Introduction: In 2020 the COVID pandemic caused a major decline in public transportation usage as huge numbers of commuters worked from home instead of commuting to a workplace. The work-from-home culture has persisted for over five years and is still being realized in languishing passenger counts, not only for Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) but for other transit agencies around the country.

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This Policy Brief examines five transit agencies to assess the degree of recovery from the huge bus and light rail ridership decline in 2020. Ridership and expenditure data for 2019 and 2024 (the most recent available) were analyzed for PRT and four systems, two with similar service area populations as PRT and two significantly larger. These include Baltimore (Maryland Transit Administration); Boston (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority); Denver (Denver Regional Transportation District) and Houston (Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County).

These agencies have service area populations, as designated by the National Transit Database (NTD) in 2024, as follows: PRT (1.7 million); Baltimore (2.2 million); Boston (4.3 million); Denver (2.7 million) and Houston (5.8 million).

The focus of the analysis is on the changes in passenger trips, total operating expenses and expenditure per trip from 2019 to 2024. The change over the five years should have offered reasonable opportunity to recover from the sharp decline caused by COVID.  The study examined only directly operated bus and light-rail service.  Most transit agencies offer other transit service modes but light-rail and buses are typically the largest and all the systems analyzed offer bus and light-rail service.

Bus service comparisons

PRT’s bus passenger count fell precipitously during COVID and by 2024, four years later, the number of trips remain substantially below the 2019 level with a drop of about 40 percent.  It’s the second-highest among the five cities in this study group, barely trailing Denver (on a percentage change basis) and with a substantially larger decline than the other three.  Note that although it has the largest population service area, Houston’s bus passenger trips were lower than PRT in 2019.

And with continually rising expenditures—although PRT was the lowest among the five cities at 17.7 percent—PRT’s nearly 40 percent decline in bus trips boosted bus operating expenses per trip by 94 percent, from $5.90 to $11.47, a near-doubling and the second-highest-per-trip expense in the group, trailing only Denver. It is important to bear in mind that overall consumer prices from December 2019 to December 2024 rose only 22.8 percent, far less than the increases to expenses per trip for all five transit agencies.

Light-rail service comparisons

For each city-transit agency in this group, the declines in light-rail trips were larger than the declines in bus trips as shown in the table below. Light-rail usage is likely to have been more affected by the pandemic than bus usage. Note that light-rail is a primary means of transportation for the workers commuting longer distances from suburbs to jobs in central cities.

Light-rail systems with fixed guideways and stations where many people board can move more passengers more expeditiously than buses which often must deal with traffic and have far more stops that prolong trip times. In all likelihood, the work-from-home culture that began during COVID has not been fully reversed as many employees still work from home, depriving light-rail of a large number of passengers.

Looking at the transit agencies comparison for light-rail, Denver had the largest decline in ridership, at a loss of nearly 55 percent from 2019 to 2024.  Pittsburgh’s PRT had the second-biggest loss at nearly 53 percent.  Both cities sustained much larger light-rail passenger declines than the other three cities in this group.

Along with the increase in total operating expenses, serious drops in passengers have produced huge increases in expenses per trip.  PRT had the smallest increase in total operating expenses at just 16 percent, far below Boston’s 38 percent jump.  However, coupled with the large drop in ridership, PRT’s expense per trip in 2024 reached a whopping $24.24—an increase of 145 percent from pre-pandemic 2019.  PRT also had the highest expense per trip in 2019 at $9.88.  Boston had the smallest expense per rider in both years ($3.38 and $7.25, respectively).

Conclusion

Expenditures per trip, both for bus and light-rail, rose sharply for the transit agencies in this sample over the five-year period of pre-pandemic to post-pandemic, even at those with a relatively small decline in numbers of passenger trips.  In general, total operating costs for each city and both transit modes have risen over the five years while passengers have declined for each city and for both transit modes.

The pandemic shutdown should have afforded transit agencies, like PRT, an opportunity to right-size operations by trimming expenses.  Instead, federal money kept them from facing realities that must be dealt with.  As firms, like PNC, force their employees back into the office on a five-day-per-week basis, maybe the passenger totals will rise and the expense per trip will fall.

But transit managers must make major efforts to rein in operating expenses dramatically.  The taxpayers that support mass transit deserve better than having to pay such outrageous subsidies per rider.  Politicians should take a long, hard look at these cost numbers and work to reduce them.